After parsing, the Ast is converted to an intermediate representation, Zir. This is where Zig diverges a bit from more typical statically compiled languages. Zir actually resembles something like Python’s bytecode — an intermediate representation that an interpreter for a dynamically-typed language would use. That’s because it is an interpreter’s IR — the next stage would use Zir to evaluate comptime.

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Ast and Zir infra is good. It is per-file, so it naturally just works in an IDE.